I'm a geochemist. In the past ten years I've fixed mass spectrometers, blasted sapphires with a laser beam, explored for uranium in a nature reserve, and measured growth patterns in fish ears, and helped design the next generation of the world's most advanced ion probe. My main interest is in-situ mass spectrometry, but I have a soft spot in my heart for thermodynamics, drillers, and cosmochemistry.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Friday, August 29, 2014

Firstly, I would like to place all six science week sonnets
(plus the bonus poem) in stratigraphic order.
That is, youngest rocks described at the top. An analysis will follow
the poetry:

A pox on
all those proxies non-unique

Which
make interpretation hard to do.

Magnesium
to calcium we seek

Sea temp'rature,
and not pCO2.

So
lithium, uranium are used

to
disambiguate the Mg curve

O. umbonatus data's
not recused.

Antarctic
ice growth isotopes observe,

But
whence the melting in the Miocene?

Here isotopes
of carbon join our tale,

And
sedimentary burndown in marine

Organic
carbon makes the icecap fail.

Antarctic ice was thawed by CO2

Let's try repeating this effect anew.

Just Sixty-six million short years ago

(Though Deccan volcanism
coincides)

The Yucatan
was smote a cosmic blow

And the Gulf shelf collapsed in those fell tides

Late Cretaceous sediments were scoured,

Deposited as “boundary cocktail.”

Unsorted forams, lime mudstone, powered

By Chicxulub-induced collapse of shale

The wildcatters call the seismic line

“Middle Cretaceous Unconformity”

Not middle, end; deluvian, malign,

Complete destructive uniformity

The Mesozoic ended
with this splat

So Gerta Keller,
please hang up your hat

The Central Atlantic
Magmatic Province

Erupted tholiitic and potassic.

C O two upset atmospheric balance.

Eco-collapse ended the Triassic.

Green sulfur bacteria’s isotopes

Show photic zone euxinia prevailed.

Stomatal size decreased (show microscopes)

And carbon biomass was soon curtailed.

Compound-specific isotopes will tell

Which phytoplankton thrived in these tough times,

While wax from leaves and calcite from a shell

Record recovery in clastic slimes.

The Triassic ended
as it began

Can those
extinctions be surpassed by man?

Australia
is a dry and stable land.

No mountain range, no active slipping fault,

And yet this plain had lava seas erupt.

We call them Kalkarindji flood basalt.

It’s hard to know just when these rocks were formed.

The weathering and rock type complicates

Radiometric dates of dykes that swarmed

When seas contained the first protochordates.

For ten long years they searched the outback rocks

For grains unhurt since fossils first were formed.

In hopes the nucleii-related clocks

Survived half billion years, still undeformed.

510 MA, a date of
some distinction.

Flood basalts can
lead to mass extinction.

Enough with carbon, climate variation

Let’s look at rocks from a far older time,

Which lacked much copper mineralization,

And when anorthosites were at their prime.

Earth’s middle age- boring for a reason?

Tectonics were remarkably unchanged.

Ice and iron were both out of season.

A billion years of uniform exchange

Of isotopes, strontium, and S

The active margins ringed the continent.

Slow, steady mantle cooling caused the process

Strong lithosphere held melts incipient

It ended with
Rodinia dispersion

Which led to Earth’s
exciting, current version.

Nobody studies fucking iodine.

The halogen too rare for us to care,

But iodate to carbonate’s inclined

So we might have a useful proxy there.

This IO3 requires oxygen,

And thus does not exist in reduced seas.

Its presence in old carbonates means then

Ozone and oxygen were in the breeze.

Archean carbonates do not have I,

But it appears when O first graced the air.

And thus another tool is forged, whereby

Our planet’s past can be unearthed to share.

This gas we breathe
controls the biosphere.

We’d like to know
what made it first appear.

The Schrödinger bacteria’s Barsoom,

Where robots scan the wadi of the Styx.

There died, or never lived a microbe bloom

When déjà vu and Dejah Thoris mix,

Her hungry eyes fixed on Hadean seas,

Lowell’s
canal dream just an aquifer.

The playa droid with X-ray vision sees;

Areocalcrete Earthings soon infer.

With carbonate and opal intergrown,

Australia’s
prayer of cheap uranium,

As vengeful Ares, orbited by drone

Blends nukes and life within his cranium

Thus Opportunity grinds sands of time

Which mortals fancy
Ceres made of lime.

Thus ends what is possibly the least effective science
awareness effort ever. I made it. A
sonnet a day, pulled from the pages of Geology, for the last 6 days of Science Week. And a bonus one earlier today, to try out some ideas I had while thinking up this post. If I wanted to kid myself, I would say that my failure was that I
picked something too popular, and that the sonnets got lost in the celebrity
gossip and other pop culture frivolity that haunts this form on the
internet. If only I had gone for
American Mineralogist Villanelles.

This is not an entirely honest assessment. It was a tricky
brief. For the first few sonnets (1, 2,
4), I was basically seeing how well or badly I could jam technical terms and concepts into
the structure without irreparably breaking the sonnet form, and still
extracting the basic gist of the paper.
With 3 and 6, I was trying to show what it was about the study that was
really clever- trying to channel the scientific genius in verse, with less of
an emphasis on the story or terminology. And with 5, I
was aiming to show the difficulty in getting any data at all for that system, and emphasizing the blood, sweat, and tear aspect of research.
Still, there are some core issues relating to good poetry and science writing which
remain unresolved.

Others have written at length on the place of metaphor in
science writing. Personally, I think
that it can be dangerous, and easily done misleadingly. Science is more like a
murder mystery than an allegory. The particulars of who knows what when and how
they determine it are generally more important than the anthropomorphisation of
the interpretation of the day, but that isn’t always easy to put in verse.

On the other hand, poetry without metaphor ain’t all that.
It is worth at least linking Poe’s Sonnet to Science, which kind of set the mold
of science as imagination-killing dreariness.
But the thing that he never realized, is that the universe is stranger
and more bizarre than our imaginations.
So it is worth at least trying to convey the breadth and depth of a
natural world which is stranger and more wonderful than anything we can possibly imagine without studying it, and
then let our feeble human brains decorate those secrets which our scientific
labour finally pries from the Earth. Furthermore, most poetry these days
doesn’t really aim for accessibility or exposition. So for 7, I maxxed the metaphor and theme,
and didn’t even try to explain.

Overall, it was a fun exercise, and the overwhelming density
of explanatory prose evident in the 3QD metrics makes me glad I tried, even if
it was too obtuse and catless to interest much of the internet.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

The long-lived, old-school blogging site 3 quarks dailyis
holding its annual science blogging contest
They have nominated eighty-five blog posts upon which one can vote to
advance it into the finals round. In
theory, this means that everyone voting should read all 85 posts, and make an
honest choice. If that doesn't work,
then they should at least skim each post- OK, how about simply clicking the
links and glancing at them?

Having done the latter, I doubt more than a few percent of
the people who actually vote will do the former. Because, in addition to clinking the links, I
have gone the extra mile micron and extracted their metadata. And this is how I’m pretty sure not many
people are going to read all 85 entries this week- they total over 128,000
words, more than a hefty novel, or two skinny ones. I will summarize it here,
for potential voters who want to pretend to be voting knowledgeably, but are too
lazy even to look at text summaries.

With the exception of a song (complete with ukulele chords)
and a dialogue, the nominated blog posts are all expository prose. Most of them are written in a serious tone,
although there is a smattering of snark, cutsiness, and metaphor. One is written
in Spanish, the rest are in English.

Figure 1. The log of science post length, showing a high end tail.

The length distribution of the nominated blog posts is not
normal. In fact, it is not even log
normal (figure 1), as there is a surplus of nominees in excess of 2000 words
and/or a deficit of nominees less than 700 words (incidentally, that is the
length of a standard print newspaper column). The lengths range from just over
300 words (the song) to just shy of 5000 words, with a mean of about 1200 and a
median of about 1500.

The relationship between the number of images and the number
of words is not clear. I have
(arbitrarily) divided the posts up into two groups (figure 2). A small, highly
illustrated group, in which the number of illustrations scales with the length
of the post, and a main, less illustrated group, where the number of
illustrations is essentially unrelated to text length. In the highly illustrated
group, there is about one additional figure per 400 words, but the zero word
intercept is still quite high- six.

Hopefully this summary will inform your choices of which
articles to read and consider. Please
don’t make any voting choices solely on the metadata. You are, after all, a human, and not a
Facebook algorithm. And sure, if you want to nominate this post for the 2015
contest, I won’t stop you.

A summary table is below:

site

title

words

images

video

text
grabs

references
(1=present)

table

3 Quarks Daily

The
Dictionary is not Literature

2539

1

Action Science Theater

How
to fall and miss the ground

541

4

1

Aeon

Cows
Might Fly

3473

1

American Science

The
Curious History of the Paleo-Diet, and its Relationship to Science &
Modernity

2194

3

An Evolutionist's Perspective

The
Woes of Capitalism: Kinship, Sociality
and Economy

1433

0

Ars Technica

Could
dark matter be hiding in plain sight in existing experiments?

1085

1

Babies Learning Language

Shifting
our cultural understanding of replication

3158

0

BBC

The
quest to save the Hollywood bison

1443

4

Beach Chair Scientist

Mother
Nature vs Santa Claus

711

0

1

4

Brainwaves

Searching
For The Elephant’s Genius Inside the Largest Brain on Land

1502

1

Charismatic Minifauna

Bats
have sparkly poop

606

4

Chemically Cultured

That
love-hate supervisor relationship

411

0

12

Cocktail Party Physics

Seen
and Unseen: Could There Ever Be a
“Cinema Without Cuts”?

2400

2

4

1

Comparatively Psyched

The
Robin's Song

1302

2

1

Curious Meerkat

Eating
Insects

1827

3

1

1

Eat Your Brains Out

Science
and the Supernatural

3802

4

1

Ecology & Evolution

And
to the victor the spoiled

474

1

Ecology & Evolution

The
Heat and Light of Science Communication

1045

1

1

Ecology & Evolution

The
Science of Scientific Whaling

1207

2

Ecology & Evolution

What
is(n’t) palaeontology like?

884

2

Ecology & Evolution

What’s
it like to study Zoology?

896

1

Errant Science

Tradition,
in Science

767

2

1

Eruptions

So,
You Think Yellowstone Is About to Erupt

1295

1

Genotopia

Hail
Britannia! (Dorkins Reviews Wade)

1759

1

Genotopia

On
city life, the history of science, and the genetics of race

2298

3

Grrlscientist

Influenza: How the Great War helped create the
greatest pandemic ever known

2088

4

1

Hawkmoth

On
Wildness

494

9

Huffpost

A
Few Short Rules on Being Creative

1313

1

Illumination

GMO
Leukemia Outbreak in China

471

1

4

Inkfish

Scientists
Ask Why There Are So Many Freaking Huge Ants

913

1

Leaving Plato's Cave

The
Meta-lympics: a catalyst for
scientific discovery

1076

4

Limulus

Living
Fossils

771

8

8

Napoli
Unplugged

Procida: Picture Perfect

881

12

Napoli
Unplugged

Vesuvius
at Night

897

4

Nautilus

The
Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face

1599

5

Neurobabble

Parasitic
wasps vs. zombie cockroaches

785

1

Neurobabble

Technology
and the adolescent brain

1112

1

Neurobabble

What
sign languages have taught us about our brains

1198

2

2

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense

When
the going gets tough, mutualism gets going

885

3

1

1

Pacific Standard

Your
Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

782

1

Patrick F

Clarkin, PhD: Developmental Plasticity
and the “Hard-Wired” Problem

4343

3

1

Pen Sapiens

Monkey
See, Monkey Yawn

764

1

1

Peter Pearsal

A
Desert Orogeny

995

5

Planetizen

The
Wicked Problem of Urban Biodiversity, pt 1

897

0

Psychology Today

Love,
Love Medulla: The Neuroscience of
Beatlemania

1181

6

1

Preposterous Universe

How
Quantum Field Theory Becomes “Effective”

3553

5

Preposterous Universe

Why
the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics Is Probably Correct

Disclaimer:

All opinions, measurements, figures, and facts on this page are the personal opinions of Charles W. Magee, Jr, and do not represent the views of any of his employers: past, present, present-but-about-to-be-past, or future. None of the content herein has been subject to peer review, and should be treated with caution or derision. Any passing mention of OSHA code violations, criminal activities, unethical or unscientific behavior, or the clandestine Australian nuclear weapons program are fictions created to make rhetorical points, and do not represent the reality of my, or anyone else's, workplace. Do not attempt any scientific protocols described herein at home, with the exception of the chocolate chip cookie recipe. Do not apply the products of that protocol to individuals with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or cholesterol, egg, wheat, dairy, or chocolate allergies. Do not view this blog continuously for more than 45 minutes without stretching and taking other precautions to prevent computer-related chronic injury.
email labhampster@gmail.com, but replace hampster with the arctic rodent after which this blog is named.